Home, Blessed Home
by EstelRaca
Summary: Tag to "Paradise Lost". Diana considers her exile and her companions from Man's World.


**Disclaimer: **I don't own them, DC does, and they did an amazing job with this show.

_**Home, Blessed Home**_

"In bringing these Outsiders to our island, you have broken our most sacred law."

She moves to protest as soon as the words leave her mother's lips, but she already knows in her heart that the action is futile... especially as the crime she is accused of is not the one she hears punishment pronounced for.

(_"You brought _men _here?_)

She doesn't turn to look at her companions, gaze fixed on her mother, willing her to stop, to rescind, to retract. She has done nothing worthy of the punishment. She _saved_ them. The cost had almost been too high, true. If her sisters ever found out how very close she had come to unleashing Hades on Earth, they would find forgiveness difficult. But shey'd stopped it. _They'd_ stopped it, her and her comrades.

Her comrades.

(_Her sisters, in Man's World._)

J'onn.

One even more alien than her to the society they faced, so far outside his understanding in the world of Men. Tortured and tormented by the people he had come to warn, he still willingly took up arms beside them. He still _trusted_ them, not a day's length after the other Men crucified him just as they had one of their gods. It had taken her time to understand the often-silent being, time to come to trust the faint whisper of presence that was his essence touching their minds, but the time had been well-spent. J'onn was many things—lost, haunted, patient, haunting. One thing he was _not_ was heartlessly self-directed, as the sisters of Themyscira were taught all Outsiders were (_all Men_).

Batman. (_Bruce, though she often felt no name dwelt beneath that mask._)

Hard, fierce, proud, he was no man. She had considered him weak on their first introduction, a "hero" with a costume but no abilities, far outclassed, there only by the other's leniency. She had never been more wrong in her life. Artemis would have loved him, the meticulous hunter who could follow a cold trail to a hot kill. Athena would have been enchanted by him, all razor-mind and rock will. Only Aphrodite might have found him lacking, not in beauty but in desire… though perhaps only she could still see the cold calculation and bittersweet agony in those dark eyes when the mask (_face_) was gone. Women of the Patriarch's World never seemed to care. There was nothing lazy and lax in him, not as Outsiders (_Men_) were supposed to be.

Clark.

He called himself an alien, but the words always rang hollow in her ears. She had never seen anyone more in control and at home in the world around him than he was. Nor had she ever seen anyone so hopelessly naïve about the very people they purported to love and protect. It had confused her for a time, until she realized that he was a child of Hestia and Demeter as surely as any sister of Themyscira might be. Purity and life, home and family, those qualities entangled and empowered him in a heady mixture that practically shone from his skin. It had not been chance that drew her thoughts to home while she was with him. If he was a traitor, an Outsider (_a Man_), then there were no true children of the gods.

Wally.

The most like the Man she had been raised to battle, to defeat, to rise above, she had found him difficult to work with at first. Far too often his tongue was involved in matters of courtship and his mind in matters that had no bearing on the present. His heart was true enough, though. He had nearly died for John. He had never shirked a battle. Once she learned to accept his odd ways of speaking to women (_to even enjoy bantering with him, at times_), she found him quite acceptable as a companion. He was not goddess-loved, not as some of the others might be, but if he was Outsider, then…

Then…

"Diana, I have no choice." Her mother's voice was thick with emotion, though not with tears. Hippolyta would not cry, not in front of her warriors, not in front of her daughter. "It is with a heavy heart that I must exile you from Themyscira."

Meeting her mother's gaze, she let the protests die. There was no point in them.

If they were Outsider, these fierce companions who had come in her time of need, without her needing to ask…

If they were Men, these beings she was growing to love as she loved her sisters…

Then so was she, and Themyscira could not be home.


End file.
